I was in a French ski resort on January 1 2000 and the first thing I thought about, when the fog of the previous night began to clear, was the Millennium Bug. Deputy US Defence Secretary John Hamre had predicted it would be ‘the electronic equivalent of the El Niño’.

Just how many planes had fallen out of the sky at the stroke of midnight? I plugged my laptop into a phone socket and heard the sound that will forever be associated with the turn of the century: ‘Eeeeee, orrrrrrrrrrrr, ooo-a-ooo-a-ooo-a-ooo-a.’

There was a pause. Had I got through? No, I hadn’t.

‘Eeeeee, orrrrrrrrrrrr, ooo-a-ooo-a-ooo-a-ooo-a.’ Dear God, how I came to hate that sound.

When I discovered that absolutely nothing had happened I felt vaguely disappointed. On the face of it, that makes me sound like a depraved nihilist – I was upset that a global disaster hadn’t occurred – but it was a sickness shared by many and, though I didn't know it at the time, symptomatic of the decade to come.

One of the most striking things about the Noughties is that when terrible things did happen – when planes really did start falling out of the sky – we greeted them with barely concealed excitement.

We watched them being replayed over and over again on CNN, drinking in the wild overestimates of casualty numbers and nodding along enthusiastically as experts confidently predicted all the cataclysmic consequences to follow. It was a form of mass hysteria – something akin to Freud’s death wish, but writ large.

If the past 10 years had one defining characteristic it was that they allowed human beings to give full expression to their yearning for chaos, one of their darkest unconscious desires. It was the decade in which people’s appetite for destruction became almost insatiable.

I don’t mean that an above average number of natural disasters occurred – though, God knows, we had our share, what with the south-east Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.

Nor do I mean that the past 10 years witnessed a significant increase in acts of terrorism or that many of them were perpetrated by suicide bombers in thrall to a sinister death cult.

Rather, it was the way these phenomena were latched on to, the apocalyptic fantasies they gave rise to. It was as if people wanted the world to be consumed in an orgiastic frenzy of ultra-violence, whether at the hand of Mother Nature or an Islamist cell in possession of a ‘dirty bomb’.

In the aftermath of the London bombings on July 7 2005, I lost count of the number of times friends of mine would take me aside and inform me that another terrorist attack on London was due to take place that weekend.

They had it ‘on the very highest authority’ – they knew someone who knew someone on COBRA or some such gobbledegook.

‘Take my advice and get out of town,’ they would say, tapping their noses. When nothing happened there was that familiar sense of anticlimax. It was the Millennium Bug all over again and their unconscious desire for destruction immediately latched on to another date – usually the following weekend.

Among the liberal intelligentsia, the conventional wisdom is that this sense of foreboding that came to typify the decade was generated by corporate and political forces that had a vested interest in keeping the masses in a state of ignorance and fear.

Adam Curtis, the BBC documentary-maker, advanced this hypothesis in The Power of Nightmares, his three-part series in 2004 about the links between Islamism and Neo-Conservatism.

He argued that the widespread panic about the threat of Islamist terrorism had been manufactured by the British and American governments, in collusion with the media-industrial complex, to justify their erosion of civil liberties and accretion of power. The brouhaha over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the War on Terror was a case in point.

‘All we’re saying in this series is: “Don’t be so frightened. Get a grip. You do face a threat but it’s not this terrifying unique force that you’ve been told it is”,’ Curtis said.

But what such theories neglect is the sheer enthusiasm with which people embraced this scaremongering. If the climate of fear that characterised the decade was the result of a sinister plot, it was a conspiracy in which ‘the masses’ were eager participants.

The panic attack was to the Noughties what cocaine was to the Nineties: it was the adrenalin rush of choice.

To my mind, the period’s key film-maker was not Lars von Trier or Michael Haneke, but Roland Emmerich, the Hollywood schlockmeister.

In two movies – The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 – he gave powerful voice to the public’s deep-rooted craving for obliteration.

Audiences sat there, spellbound, as the world’s landmarks were demolished one by one. Emmerich managed to come up with the weapons of mass destruction that the UN inspectors had failed to discover.

In The Day After Tomorrow, the cause of the world’s end was global warming and it is hard to dismiss the suspicion that the widespread belief in climate change was just another facet of people’s unconscious desire for annihilation. Rarely has such a complicated scientific theory been taken up with such passion by so many.

No area of modern life in the Noughties, from mineral water to light bulbs, was unaffected by this hypothesis. And woe betide the ‘deniers’ who dared question the claims of the climate change lobby.

It was almost as if the zealots and nutcases who believed the world would end in 1999 had substituted one dogma for another. The End is Still Nigh, Just Not Quite as Nigh as We Originally Thought.

Of course, not everyone was as pessimistic as these bell-ringers. The counterpoint to all this Sturm und Drang was the cult of new technology, another key characteristic of the decade.

In the Sixties, Harold Wilson spoke about the ‘white heat of this revolution’, but the pace of technological change accelerated exponentially in the Noughties, as if it had been forced through the Large Hadron Collider.

Scarcely a week went by without a new gadget capturing the public’s imagination – the PlayStation, the iPod, the BlackBerry, the Xbox, the iPhone – and the internet began to dominate popular culture in a way that music had in the Seventies, television in the Eighties and movies in the Nineties.

On the face of it, the internet was a great boon to the decade, enabling people to get books more easily (Amazon), buy second-hand goods more cheaply (eBay) and download the latest album at the click of a mouse (iTunes).

For better or worse, it also accelerated the process of self-actualisation that had been one of the dominant memes of the 20th century, allowing people to express themselves (blogs, Twitter), draw attention to themselves (YouTube), promote themselves (MySpace) and fellate themselves (YouPorn).

Yet for all the cheering and high five-ing that accompanied these phenomena, they also provoked their fair share of hand wringing. It was the digital version of Newton’s law: To every action celebrating the arrival of a new invention there was always an opposed and equal reaction.

Flick through any tabloid newspaper of the period and you’ll stumble across headlines like this: ‘HOW USING FACEBOOK COULD RAISE YOUR RISK OF CANCER.’ Or this: ‘HOW COMPUTERS CAN HARM YOUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE… BY DAMAGING THEIR BRAINS.’

Or this: ‘USING THIS PHOTO, OUR REPORTER POSED AS A 15-YEAR-OLD GIRL ON MYSPACE – ONE OF THE WEBSITES USED BY MILLIONS OF TEENAGERS. WITHIN HOURS SHE’D BEEN TARGETED BY A PREDATORY PAEDOPHILE. HOW SAFE IS YOUR CHILD?’

For me, one of the comic highpoints of the decade was being ‘caught out’ in a Watchdog sting designed to prove that users of Facebook were vulnerable to identity theft.

After one of the programme’s undercover reporters managed to befriend me by posing as an old acquaintance, I was invited into the studio and told that the reporter now had access to all sorts of sensitive personal information, such as my date of birth.

I gently explained that as the author of two volumes of confessional memoirs I wasn’t overly concerned about my privacy.

Not all the anxiety swirling around the internet was misplaced. Filesharing – or ‘piracy’, as its critics called it – had a devastating impact on the music business. Napster might have been successfully closed down in 2001, but dozens of filesharing sites sprung up in its place.

In the United States, total revenues from the sale of CDs, vinyl, cassettes and legal downloads declined from $14.6 billion (£8.8 billion) in 1999 to $10.4 billion in 2008. The impact of internet piracy on the movie business was slower to take effect, but in the end proved just as damaging.

Twentieth Century Fox’s DVD sales fell by 15 per cent between 2007 and 2008, Warner Bros’ declined by 24 per cent and Disney’s dropped by a whopping 33 per cent.

The Hollywood studios had been hoping to make up for this shortfall through sales of Blu-ray discs, but the format showed few signs of taking off.

In 2008, the total revenue from global sales of Blu-ray discs and the now discontinued HD DVD discs was just $750 million.

According to Callum McDougall, the executive producer of Quantum of Solace, copyright theft cost the British film industry £486 million in lost revenues in 2007.

However, this economic turmoil hardly justified the end-of-the-line pessimism that became so prevalent in the media and entertainment industries as the Noughties progressed.

On the contrary, the sense of doom that pervaded these professions was symptomatic of the mood that characterised the whole decade and rarely had a basis in cool-headed analysis. Just because you’ve been made redundant and may have to take your kids out of private school doesn’t mean the world is coming to an end.

The late AJP Taylor liked to joke that the reason so many books about the decline of the West were published in the first half of the 20th century is because economic circumstances had forced academics and intellectuals to do their own washing up for the first time.

The internet wasn’t the only broadcast medium that produced a glass-half-empty response from the chattering classes. Television was also the subject of much derision. Critics focused on the unstoppable rise of ‘reality’ – programmes like Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here – and cited it as evidence of ‘dumbing down’.

Even Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell’s successful reinvention of the talent show (the Idol and Got Talent franchises) was criticised for pandering to people’s desire to watch freaks being humiliated.

In any history of the period, Cowell deserves a chapter all to himself. At the turn of the century, he was an unknown British record executive. By decade’s end he had dominated mass entertainment on both sides of the Atlantic, becoming the highest-paid man on US prime time television.

Yet seen from a different perspective, the glass looks half full. In the US, serial television drama experienced a creative flowering comparable to that of Hollywood in the Seventies. Among the decade’s highpoints were The West Wing, The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, The Shield, House, Lost, Desperate Housewives, Damages and Mad Men.

In Britain, Channel 4 reinvented the docudrama (with the help of über-talented scribe Peter Morgan) and the BBC gave us definitive adaptations of Bleak House and Little Dorrit, thanks to the dramatic skills of Andrew Davies. In this light, the past 10 years could be regarded as a golden age of television.

Another topic on which the Commentariat were prone to start frothing at the mouth was the culture of celebrity.

The public’s obsession with women like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan was often cited as evidence of our moral and spiritual decline and they were compared unfavourably to Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn.

Some critics hoped that 9/11 would prove a corrective, reminding people of the important things in life, but there was scant evidence of that.

In fact, the rule about silicon chips seems to apply to celebrity tittle-tattle. Just as the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years, so, too, does the amount of media attention devoted to Paris Hilton.

However, a brief trawl through the history of the 20th century reveals that we were no more obsessed with vapid celebrities in the Noughties than we were previously.

Sykes was a blonde with a 41.5in bust who became so famous after her appearance on Arthur Askey’s television programme in 1955 that more than 4,000 people turned up to see her open an ironmongers in Sheffield.

Known as Sabrina – like Jordan, she only had one name – she dominated the tabloids for several years, prompting exactly the same sort of hand wringing about the shortcomings of modern celebrities that Victoria Beckham does today.

There are plenty of contemporary figures who don’t deserve the attention that’s lavished on them, but it’s unfair to compare people who are famous in the present with people whose fame has endured.

Every age throws up a lot of public figures, most of whom are instantly forgotten. The ones we remember are those who’ve done something remarkable, like conquered an empire or written a great book. For that reason, those who possess enduring fame are always going to seem more impressive than the vast majority of present-day celebrities.

There is one area, however, in which it’s difficult to argue with the prophets of doom: the global financial crisis of 2007-2009. The major US and European banks came perilously close to collapse in 2008 thanks to their exposure to toxic debt and would have failed if it hadn’t been for last-minute state intervention.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that by decade’s end these banks will have lost $2.8 trillion. In Britain, the nation’s economic fortunes could be charted by the rise and fall of property prices, an obsession that came to define the decade.

As with other disasters, however, the consequences of this financial meltdown haven’t been as catastrophic as some Eeyores had hoped. By the third quarter of 2009, the economies of the US, Japan and Germany had all returned to growth, with only Britain still officially in recession.

Contrary to some predictions, the credit crunch did not lead to the Second Great Depression. Indeed, for three quarters of the Noughties, the global economy boomed, producing a sustained period of unrivalled prosperity.

Compared to the storm clouds of the 20th century, the first decade of the 21st century has been a ray of sunshine. True, the US and its European allies have been involved in two Middle Eastern wars, but the threat to liberal democracy posed by groups like al-Qaeda is fairly small beer next to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

If the West is not quite experiencing the moment of triumph predicted by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History, it is nevertheless in rude health. We even have an inspirational leader in Barack Obama. As Harold Macmillan once said, we’ve never had it so good.

Why, then, so much pessimism? Why the desire for calamity? My theory is that it was a hangover from the previous decade. 1999 wasn’t simply the end of the 20th century, but of the second millennium.

As such, people were expecting huge upheaval. All kinds of strange cults sprang up, eagerly looking forward to an earth-shattering event.

Among the technocratic elite this took the form of conjuring up the spectre of the Millennium Bug, but there were thousands of other examples. The world’s population was waiting, with ill-disguised glee, for the 20th-century equivalent of the meteorite that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs.

When nothing happened, people felt cheated. But instead of concluding that their prognostications of doom were irrational, they looked elsewhere to affirm them. They began searching for the slate-cleaning catharsis that had been denied them on December 31 1999.

In this way, all the anxiety that had been building up in the last decade of the second millennium seeped into the first decade of the third, poisoning the atmosphere.

What should have been a happy period – perhaps the happiest in history – became a fairly miserable one. For the first 10 years of the 21st century, mankind was in the grip of a fever dream in which they saw their world destroyed over and over again.